Background:On any given day, there
are about 10,000 children in family foster care in Georgia.For most children who enter foster care in
Georgia because of abuse and neglect family foster homes are the preferred
placement.This is because most foster
children thrive in an environment when the love and nurturance of a volunteer
family is freely given as it commonly is in such homes.Even though this is the preferred placement,
Georgia presently finds itself about 1000 families short of the optimum number
of foster homes that it needs to care properly for the children who are in its
custody. Like other counties in Georgia, the counties of Fulton and Dekalb find
themselves in a crisis situation because of the lack of foster homes; foster
children often languish in shelters or group homes because they have no other,
more appropriate, placement options.

Out of Home Placement--The Costs

Family Foster Care--12:50 to 14.75 per day

Institutional Foster Care--$32:20 to 80.80 per day

Therapeutic Foster Care--$111.78 per day

Intermediate Therapeutic Care--$101.83 to $202.31

Intensive
Therapeutic Care--$165.00 to $308.50

The public foster care system is challenged
by its limited number of foster parents. Children often falter whilst making
their way through an increasingly costly and fragmented foster care system.
Most counties experience some difficulty finding appropriate placements for
children; this is partly because we ask foster parents to care for children at
a reimbursement rate never higher than $14.75 a day. It is no wonder, then,
that caseworkers count themselves lucky to find an appropriate foster home
placement--because the reimbursement rate is so low, most foster parents must
subsidize the State with their own resources, which creates a huge burden on
family foster homes and discourages new families from their desire to become
foster homes themselves.

How does Foster Care
fit into the Child Welfare System?

Without a strong foster
care system, the entire child welfare system is weakened. Foster care is usually
the entry point for at-risk children into the system. The State generally
initiates involvement with a family when the safety and well-being of a child
is at-risk. Many times, a child must be taken from the home in order to
protect him/her from further harm. Foster care is the respite for the child
and sometimes for the family during such a traumatic family crisis.

Child welfare reform
seeks to ensure the benefit of tying the care of the child and the family
together through the foster family so that the foster family becomes an
extended family to the biological family, giving support in times of need.
Relationships are developed with the child as well as with the family.
Community involvement, family support and preservation, and reunification, rather
than family and community dissolution, become the attainable end for foster
care.

Children must be seen in
the context of the systems from which they come. Their families and
neighborhoods shape their lives in important ways. As reform initiatives look
for ways to care for children in these systems, there is a realization that a
child and his family must be cared for together. The blending of foster care
with the continuing support of the child's family is one method of addressing
this critical issue.

Children cannot be cared
for as if they were autos to be repaired, shifted from shop to shop, in the
hopes that one will find a fix at some distant point. Children must be cared
for in the context of family and community who are personally invested in the
child’s welfare. When foster care was taken out of the volunteer sector
venue, an important tool was taken from our communities: foster care is one
essential element of the community-based continuum of services linking
children within family and community. The State's support of the ancillary
services provided by private child placing agencies will do much to keep this
powerful tool within their grasp.

To accentuate further an already critical
situation, the State has estranged itself from a large source of foster homes
because the State has a policy of not reimbursing the supporting network of
community-based private foster care agencies. The services that private foster
care agencies provide to support the care of children, such as recruitment,
training, support, administration, and respite care, are not reimbursed at all.
Those agencies that are licensed to provide private foster care for the State's
children are reimbursed only for the per diem of foster parents, or $14.75 per
day.Fewer than 200 children are in
private foster care agencies.

These agencies could provide hundreds of
desperately needed foster parents if the State would provide them with the
resources to care adequately for these children. Our largest private foster
care agency is Georgia AGAPE; they care for over 50 children in Fulton and
Dekalb Counties. Georgia AGAPE is a charitable arm of the Churches of Christ
while the Church of Christ is one of the smallest religious constituencies in
the State. One has to wonder what would happen if some of our largest
charitable constituencies supported the State in foster care. We
certainly would not have a foster care crisis.

Benefits of Supporting Community-Based
Child-Placing Agencies

1. More Providers--With proper incentives to provide
services, more volunteer constituencies will desire to contribute to their
communities through the provision of foster care. Presently there are over 40
licensed private foster care placement agencies in the state. Most of these
agencies, however, provide adoption services, not foster care. Most have only
a few foster families. The costs and liabilities are too great for agencies
to recruit foster families aggressively without support from the State.

2. More levels of
care--On a cost
basis, any number of levels of care and services can be provided depending on
the needs of a child and family. These can be defined by contract to address
individual needs of the child and family.

3. Higher quality
foster care--With
more foster families, the best and the brightest foster families could be
identified and utilized, rather than simply placing a child in the first
available home without regard for the child’s needs or the family’s
strengths.

4. Public/private
partnership--Communities
will own the solutions as well as the problems found in the present system.

The State has not allowed the volunteer
community-based constituencies of the State to join them as partners in foster
care. An example of a state which does that is Illinois, which has a foster
care population similar to Georgia’s;however seventy percent (70%) of the children are cared for by the
volunteer sector. Other examples of utilizing the volunteer sector to provide
foster care are in the following states: Colorado 30%, Indiana 20%,Pennsylvania
80%, D.C. 25%, Michigan 66%, and Maryland 25%. These states have realized that
the volunteer sector can be a valuable resource for addressing their foster
care needs. In the face of those states’ success, it is shocking to discover
that Georgia’s utilization of the volunteer sector for the recruitment,
training, and support of foster parenting is less than one percent (1%).

Policy Recommendation:

1.Reimburse
Private Child-Placing Agencies for the provision of family foster care services. Through
Georgia's policies, the public sector must facilitate families, individuals and
communities to take responsibility for homeless, neglected, and abused youth.
Encouraging and supporting our volunteer constituencies in caring for our
children who need out-of-home care can accomplish this.

2.Utilize the
present Institution Foster Care Reimbursement System--Institutional Foster Care Providers represents
community-based agencies that provide services for children who are at risk of
out-of-home care.Most provide group
home care, often called a children's home, orphans’ home or emergency
shelter.Some are licensed to provide
child-placing services or foster home services.If a group home chooses to provide foster care services they can
relatively easily place this service on their license with their group home
care.IFC's are reimbursed at 62% of
cost.Their foster care services are
reimbursed only at the $14.75 rate.This rate is much too low for most agencies to provide this service to
the state.

How the Reimbusement would Look.

WeCare
Agency would provide:

40
children in group home children care @ $50.00 per day
20 children in foster care @ $50.00 per day
-----
60 children in care

Cost
would be figured on the total 60 children @ 62% of cost.

The
resources of the agency would be spread over the total number of children in
care.